Nation: How Silly Can You Get?

Among other things, the civil rights bill created some new Government
jobs among them the directorship of the Federal Community Relations
Service, which will offer Southern communities help in ironing out
their integration problems.

Who should the director be? Ideally, he ought to be someone acceptable
to the South with a good record on integration. Such men are hard to
find, and President Johnson was perplexed. Then Commerce Secretary
Luther Hodges, an ex-Governor of North Carolina, suggested LeRoy
Collins, 55, an ex-Governor of Florida. During six years in office
(1955-60) in Tallahassee, his native city, Collins had talked a
fair-to-middlin' civil rights...